WTF?

What's the Future and Why It's Up to Us

About the Book

WTF? can be an expression of amazement or an expression of dismay. In today’s economy, we have far too much dismay along with our amazement, and technology bears some of the blame. In this combination of memoir, business strategy guide, and call to action, Tim O'Reilly, Silicon Valley’s leading intellectual and the founder of O’Reilly Media, explores the upside and the potential downsides of today's WTF? technologies.

What is the future when an increasing number of jobs can be performed by intelligent machines instead of people, or done only by people in partnership with those machines? What happens to our consumer based societies—to workers and to the companies that depend on their purchasing power? Is income inequality and unemployment an inevitable consequence of technological advancement, or are there paths to a better future? What will happen to business when technology-enabled networks and marketplaces are better at deploying talent than traditional companies? How should companies organize themselves to take advantage of these new tools? What’s the future of education when on-demand learning outperforms traditional institutions? How can individuals continue to adapt and retrain? Will the fundamental social safety nets of the developed world survive the transition, and if not, what will replace them?

O'Reilly is "the man who can really can make a whole industry happen," according to Eric Schmidt, Executive Chairman of Alphabet (Google.) His genius over the past four decades has been to identify and to help shape our response to emerging technologies with world shaking potential—the World Wide Web, Open Source Software, Web 2.0, Open Government data, the Maker Movement, Big Data, and now AI. O’Reilly shares the techniques he's used at O’Reilly Media to make sense of and predict past innovation waves and applies those same techniques to provide a framework for thinking about how today’s world-spanning platforms and networks, on-demand services, and artificial intelligence are changing the nature of business, education, government, financial markets, and the economy as a whole. He provides tools for understanding how all the parts of modern digital businesses work together to create marketplace advantage and customer value, and why ultimately, they cannot succeed unless their ecosystem succeeds along with them.

The core of the book's call to action is an exhortation to businesses to DO MORE with technology rather than just using it to cut costs and enrich their shareholders. Robots are going to take our jobs, they say. O'Reilly replies, “Only if that’s what we ask them to do! Technology is the solution to human problems, and we won’t run out of work till we run out of problems." Entrepreneurs need to set their sights on how they can use big data, sensors, and AI to create amazing human experiences and the economy of the future, making us all richer in the same way the tools of the first industrial revolution did. Yes, technology can eliminate labor and make things cheaper, but at its best, we use it to do things that were previously unimaginable! What is our poverty of imagination? What are the entrepreneurial leaps that will allow us to use the technology of today to build a better future, not just a more efficient one? Whether technology brings the WTF? of wonder or the WTF? of dismay isn't inevitable. It's up to us!

Critical Praise

“the act of reading WTF clarified certain foggy notions with which I’ve been wrestling, distilling them into more concise reckonings….O’Reilly’s book has a way of nudging things into the light: He takes sincere offense with the way our tech-driven capitalistic system has developed, and spends a lot of his book laying out a case for why we have to change our approach to how we run our companies and our governments.” - John Battelle, NewCo Shift

“Tim O’Reilly’s creative insights and moral clarity have made him the trusted guide to waves of technology now sweeping the planet. If you want a better future, don’t just read this book, but make sure your friends do, too.” - Erik Brynjolfsson, Director MIT Initiative on the Digital Economy and Co-author of The Second Machine Age

“For anyone who wants to know how to prepare for the future – and how we might shape that future in ways that broadly benefit society, not just technological or entrepreneurial elites—WTF? is an indispensable guide.” - Reid Hoffman, co-founder of LinkedIn and co-author of the #1 New York Times bestseller The Alliance: Managing Talent in the Networked Age

“O’Reilly has an uncanny knack for charting what’s ahead. In WTF?, he shows us know he does it. At a time of sweeping change, it is a bracing and an exhilarating read.” - Anne-Marie Slaughter, President and CEO, New America

“So many insights, so much history, so much of our future by the consummate insider who is as much a part of the story as the people and ideas he writes about - I was learning something on more or less every page.” - Dr. James Manyika, director, McKinsey Global Institute

“Tim has been an astute observer of both the successes and the excesses of Silicon Valley. This provocative book distills the lessons he has learned about the power of technology to shape our economy and our lives.” - Hal Varian, Google chief economist

“No one is better at understanding the future than Tim O’Reilly. He has an intuitive feel and a deep knowledge of technology. This book makes sense of the astonishing transformations that are happening around us and is an indispensable guidebook to tomorrow.” - Walter Isaacson, President & CEO, The Aspen Institute

“[a] punchy and provocative book… What’s the Future is an insightful and heartfelt plea, daring us to reimagine a better economy and society… a jaunty read with a compelling narrative of how technology interweaves with the real world. If it can cajole even a few tech titans to dwell on the social and political impact of what they do then it will have served a useful purpose.” - Financial Times

“WTF? is a book about technology as it was, as it is, and as it could be. It is told from the perspective of someone who has been personally present at the most important moments in the fast-paced history of tech, and who played a significant role in those moments. It’s a rare and important piece of criticism that inspires even as it dissects. Please do read this book.” - Cory Doctorow, Boing Boing

Product Details

ISBN:9780062565716

ISBN 10: 0062565710

Imprint:Harper Business

On Sale:
10/10/2017

Trimsize: 6.000 in (w)
x 9.000 in (h)
x 1.370 in (d)

Pages:448

List Price: $32.99

BISAC1 : BUSINESS & ECONOMICS / Development / Economic Development

BISAC2 : TECHNOLOGY & ENGINEERING / Inventions

BISAC3 : BUSINESS & ECONOMICS / Business Ethics

Photo by L. Reid

Tim O'Reilly

Biography

Tim O’Reilly is the founder and CEO of O’Reilly Media, the company that has been providing the picks and shovels of learning to the Silicon Valley gold rush for the past thirty-five years. The company delivers online learning, publishes books, runs conferences, and has repeatedly shaped the discussion for each successive wave of innovation. Tim is also a partner at O’Reilly AlphaTech Ventures, an early stage venture firm, and is on the boards of Code for America, Maker Media, PeerJ, Civis Analytics, and PopVox.

Are you aTim O'Reilly
fan?

Sign up now for Tim O'Reilly
alerts, including news and special offers.

*This is a promotional service of HarperCollins
Publishers, 195 Broadway, New York, NY
10007, providing information about the products of HarperCollins and its affiliates.
By
submitting your email address, you understand that you will receive email
communications
from
Bookperk and other HarperCollins services. You may unsubscribe from these email
communications at
any time. If you have any questions, please review our privacy
policy or email us at
privacypolicy@harpercollins.com.